Life Lessons from Years of Swim Training

Month: December 2014

I swam for 8 years in the Northern Virginia area. I swam for a summer league team with over 100 members, my high school team of over 40 kids, and a year round club team which had between 600 and 800 members, over 50 of which swam at my practice site on a regular basis. I have no friends from that experience. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Not even one peripheral acquaintance located on Facebook. Given the thousands of hours I spent in this pursuit, that is a sad and pitiful statistic.

Given my own experience, it has been an ongoing wonder for me to watch my swimmers interact and build friendships. I have to confess that there were times I simply didn’t understand when a kid changed teams (or refused to, despite bad coaching) because “that’s where their friends were”. I have learned from them how much better the intensity of practice and the stress of meets can be when shared with people you care about. I have learned, mostly from my high school team, that the motivation for attending a 5:30am practice can be gleaned from the sharing of the misery. I have learned that while parents and coaches can say a lot, the most powerful words come from your friends. The swimmers I’ve coached have taught me what my own experience lacked.

That emotional connection, that love, is truly the glue that holds it all together, as well as the prize that makes it all worthwhile. Having folks in your corner, cheering for you and rooting for your success, offering a hug and a shoulder when things don’t go well…isn’t that what we all want? Whether it’s a dozen people, or just that one best friend, no one matters quite the way those friends do. They are the lift, the security blanket, the laughter, the tears, the scream of joy, the quiet understanding, the ones who are there solely because they want to be. They are the ones our eyes seek first, the ones who will understand best both our joy and our disappointment, the ones who do not judge or critique or point out where we went wrong. They are the ones who know when we are not feeling well, or having relationship issues, or family problems, or ate too much ice cream. They are the ones willing to go to bat for us and ask for help when we can’t ask for ourselves.

While I know that my attention and presence were important to my swimmers, they taught me how much more crucial that friend, that love connection, was to their growth and success. They have friends that are friends away from the pool, friends they will keep because they laughed and cried and understood and cheered and hugged and sang songs and offered a towel and sometimes just stood there next to them. I’m glad I got to see it, and share in its warmth.

Competitive swimming is about details, no doubt about it. Every motion is analyzed, from the position of the head to the angle of the hand on entry to the bend of the knee. We measure heart rate recovery, and the building of workouts consists of balancing elements of the different energy systems. Minutes of training, rest between sets, weight lifted, number of practices, stroke count, reaction time, breathing, and above all, time, time, time….we measure it all. It is easy for both coaches and swimmers to get bogged down and succumb to the tyranny of measuring the details.

You remember when you were little, and you swam wildly and happily, just because it was fun? You didn’t really care how it looked or how long it took, you just DID IT. Somewhere along the line we lose the ability to do this so easily, and it usually starts with a comment like “Hey, you could be really good at this if…”

If. If only you came to more practice. If only you tried harder. If only you fixed this or that. If only you started focusing on the details.

So we do. We like the idea of being good at something, and we like the idea of pleasing people, so we start to focus on the details, work harder, show up more, measure, measure, measure. The more we focus, however, the farther away “good” seems to be…no matter how much we improve, there is always a measurement that says we can be better, faster, stronger, or more dedicated. Before we know it, we can’t remember what it felt like to have fun swimming.

I could see the tension in my swimmers who were at this point, tension in the shoulders, in the face. They were flooded with disappointment in themselves when they failed to reach a measurement that meant “good”, and there was almost a sense of defeat in the realization that there was always another “good” to reach.

My advice to them was simple: swim with joy and abandon. Separate practice from competition, and remember that practice is where we work, measure, and focus on details. Competition is the place to shut measurement brain down, and just DO, just BE, revel in the moment. Trust the work done at practice, stop thinking, and go. Just DO, just BE. Make the measurement of “good” whether it felt fun again.

Joy and abandon.

Life must also be this balance of doing the work and focusing on the details, and then throwing ourselves out there with joy and abandon, reveling in the moment, whatever it may be. Joy should be our goal, not some measurement that means “good” to someone else, not society’s definition of success. Joy should be the goal.

So absolutely, yes, work hard. Have integrity. Show up. Do the right things. Focus on the details. And then throw yourself wildly, with abandon, into the things that give you joy. Let go of caring how you look or what other people think or how you “measure up”, and throw yourself into your joy.

When swimmers could learn to let go and swim with joy again, they often ended up easily achieving and surpassing the “measurement” they were after, with the added bonus of not caring as much. They enjoyed getting there, having the time they were after, but the joy of reconnecting with the fun part of their sport became the goal. The more joy was the goal, the better they got, and the less they worried about it.